Yesterday Trump tweeted the following congratulations to President Xi and the Chinese people for the 70th anniversary of the cultural revolution which murdered millions of people:
So I responded with a tweet invoking my friend Avi Yemini’s now famous internet meme:
If you don’t know the video you can see that in Avi’s tweet which he put up just a few minutes behind mine:
But what interests me is the utter failure of Google Translate to come up with anything approaching a passable translation of all the insults that were hurled my way by an army of Chinese twitter accounts, bots or not.
I’ll start with just about the only one that Google Translate gets right.
Food seems to be a common theme.
Once again food purchasing, but this time with chess! Is an accusation of playing chess a reference to the cultural revolution and the destruction of the bourgeois middle class?
Now we move on to the medicine section with some capitalism hate thrown in.
Insults about being a poor family man?
And we’ll end with possibly my favourite purely because it is so obviously completely without meaning.
How on earth can anyone claim that the world is anywhere near approaching some kind of useful, general Artificial Intelligence when the wealthiest company in the world can’t even begin to translate what are probably common curses from a language spoken by a billion people?
P.S. if anyone can actually read Chinese characters and give me real translations I’d love to hear from you in the comments!
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